This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

Scorsese takes a break from the Mean Streets in The 50 Year Argument

It’s hard to think of a more unlikely protagonist for a Martin Scorsese movie than Robert Silvers, the editor and co-founder of the New York Review of Books.

For decades, Scorsese has been telling stories about the city where he was born, from Mean Streets (1973) through The Wolf of Wall Street (2013). But with the brain-candy documentary The 50 Year Argument he turns to a strikingly different side of the city from the ones known to characters like the one Robert De Niro famously portrayed in Taxi Driver.

Co-directed by Scorsese and David Tedeschi, Argument is really a profile of the New York intellectual world, as reflected in the half-century history of a publication that is remarkable for the tenacious loyalty of its followers despite the sweeping changes that have turned the printed word into an endangered species.

Robert Silvers, editor of the New York Review of Books, in the Martin Scorsese documentary The 50 Year Argument. Silvers takes a 20-minute cab ride to the office every workday.

The film is sprinkled with literary celebrities and memorable controversies but, among other things, it’s a salute to Silvers, who has shaped its content since the day the Review was born in 1963, taking advantage of a chance to fill a large gap during the city’s newspaper strike, which meant there was no New York Times Book Review.

Now four months after its one-night-only screening in September as part of the Toronto International Film Festival’s Maverick series, The 50 Year Argument is returning to Toronto for a limited run Jan. 23 to Feb. 6 at the Bloor Hot Docs Cinema.

“We are blessed with a high rate of renewal,” Silvers proudly told me the other day in an interview shortly after taking a 20-minute taxi ride from his Upper East Side home to the Review’s West Village office, as he has been doing for years.

Miraculously, with a record 150,000 subscribers, the Review, which publishes 20 issues a year, is doing just fine.

As for the future, Silvers says: “We are feeling our way, but I don’t see any sign of anything lagging or slowing down.” And the same can be said about the Review’s 84-year-old editor, who has no plans to retire or recruit a successor.

It was Silvers who approached Scorsese with the idea of making a film on the occasion of the Review’s 50th anniversary. Scorsese was intrigued, partly because in recent years he has often turned to documentary, and partly because he remembers how he was drawn to the publication in its earliest days. He was only 20 or 21. He picked up a copy because it looked interesting but not intellectually intimidating.

“I came from a culture where reading was not a habit,” Scorsese explained. Discovering this publication helped draw him into the world of books and ideas. “It changed my mind about many things.”

But just how do you translate the story of a print publication into a visual experience for a film audience?

“We had no plan,” Scorsese admitted during a panel discussion after the TIFF screening in September. “We weren’t at all sure we could make it work. But once we said yes, we had to find a plan.”

A cocktail celebration of the anniversary at New York’s Town Hall turned out to be one key way of structuring the film, including a number of still-photo portraits of guests taken on that night.

What propels the film is not only glimpses of literary stars but flashbacks to some of the most dramatic issues debated in the Review’s pages, such as Joan Didion’s coverage of the group falsely convicted in the Central Park rape case, Mary McCarthy’s reporting from Vietnam and, in more recent times, a provocative take on Occupy Wall Street.

It’s clear there is a lot worth celebrating. One of the Review’s chief strengths is the fact that it gives contributors a chance to write at length without restriction or interference. Literary feuds have helped make it talked about and relevant, and so has the presence of intellectual stars including Gore Vidal, Norman Mailer, McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Robert Lowell and Didion: all drawn by the promise of space and total freedom to say whatever they think.

Silvers says he has no ambition to be a writer.

“I don’t write. I admire writers and I try to get the best out of them. That’s what editors do.”

I asked him whether he is looking forward to celebrating the Review’s 60th anniversary in 2023.

“Right now,” he replied, “all I am thinking about is what’s going to be in our next issue and the issue after that.”

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com